Gender

& Chinese
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History
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as
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Transformative
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Encounters
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Edited by Beverly Bossler

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University of Washington Press

Seattle and London
© 2015 by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Design by Thomas Eykemans
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Composed in Minion, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
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form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any

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information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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University of Washington Press

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www.washington.edu/uwpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gender and Chinese history : transformative encounters / edited by Beverly Bossler.
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 ISBN 978-0-295-99470-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Women—China—Social conditions. 2. Women—China—History. 
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3. Sex role—China—History. I. Bossler, Beverly Jo.

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 HQ1767.G457 2015
 304.420951—dc23 2014047603
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The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of
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American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed

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Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. ∞

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 Contents
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Acknowledgments ix
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Note on Terminology xi
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Chronology xii
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Introduction
Beverly Bossler 3
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Part One
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Early Moder n Evolutions

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Chapter one
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Les Noces chinoises: An Eighteenth-Century French

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Representation of a Chinese Wedding Procession

Ann Waltner 21
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Chapter two
The Control of Female Energies: Gender
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and Ethnicity on China’s Southeast Coast

Guotong Li 41
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Chapter three
Collecting Masculinity: Merchants and Gender
Performance in Eighteenth-Century China
Yulian Wu  59
 Chapter four
Writing Love: The Heming ji by Wang Zhaoyuan and Hao Yixing
Weijing Lu 83

Part Two
“Cloistered Ladies” to New Women

Chapter five
“Media-Savvy” Gentlewomen of the 1870s and Beyond
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Ellen Widmer 113
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Chapter six
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The Fate of the Late Imperial “Talented Woman”: Gender

and Historical Change in Early-Twentieth-Century China
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Joan Judge 139
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Chapter seven
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Moving to Shanghai: Urban Women of Means in the Late Qing

Yan Wang 161
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Part Three
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R adicalism and Ruptures

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Chapter eight
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The Life of a Slogan

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Emily Honig 185
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Chapter nine
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Bad Transmission
Gail Hershatter 209
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Glossary of Chinese Characters 227

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Bibliography 235
List of Contributors 257
Index 261
 Acknowledgments
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This volume began with papers presented at a research seminar titled

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“Moving Forward: Gender and Chinese History,” held at University of Cal-

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ifornia, Davis, on May 8, 2010. I am grateful to the University of California

Humanities Research Institute, and to the Office of the Dean of Social Sci-
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ences at University of California, Davis, for their generous support of that

seminar. The seminar brought together a number of scholars of gender in
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China to assess the state of the subfield. What had been accomplished?
Where were the gaps in our knowledge? How had our studies of gender
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in China changed the way we thought about Chinese history and about
hi

gender itself? And most important, how could we take research on gender
in China in new and exciting directions? Some of our answers to these
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questions can be found in this volume. Our seminar was also enhanced
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by the fascinating presentations of Cherie Barkey, Dorothy Ko, and Wang

Zheng, and by the penetrating insights and incisive critiques by Joan Cad-
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den and Catherine Kudlick (both European historians) and Margery Wolf
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(an anthropologist). I extend my heartfelt appreciation to all the partici-

pants, whose engaged and lively discussion contributed so much to the
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occasion and to this book.

It has been a special privilege to work with the authors whose research
s

appears in these pages: collectively they represent some of the field’s most
accomplished scholars and some of its most promising young intellects.
I thank all of them for their patience as I completed other projects before
turning to this one. I am especially grateful to Ellen Widmer for offering
assistance and encouraging me to persevere, and to Gail Hershatter for pro-
viding advice and humor on countless occasions. I thank the group as well

ix
for their exemplary adherence to deadlines and responsiveness to queries,
which made the job of editor straightforward and rewarding.
Publication of this volume would not have been possible without the
encouragement, support, and critical expertise of Lorri Hagman at the
University of Washington Press, who shepherded us though the acceptance
process and provided expert guidance on all matters editorial. Tim Zim-
mermann likewise patiently fielded endless questions about the illustrations,
and Jacqueline Volin patiently oversaw the production process. I extend
our thanks to each of them. The thoughtful comments of two anonymous
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readers were also instrumental in improving the individual papers and the
coherence of the volume as a whole.
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At so many different levels, by far the greatest debt of appreciation for

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the existence of this volume is owed to Susan Mann, whose contributions

to the history of women and gender in China are legion. As a scholar and
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as a person, she sets a standard of integrity and generosity to which we all

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aspire. Directly or indirectly, she has served as a colleague, mentor, and

friend to each of us. To her this volume is dedicated with respect, gratitude,
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and affection.
BJB
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as
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x Acknowledgments
 Note on Ter minology
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In China before the twentieth century, age was counted in sui. A child was
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deemed to be one sui at birth and became another sui older at each New Year.
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Thus a child born in the twelfth month, shortly before the New Year, would
be counted as two sui when, by Western count, she was only a month old. In
of

general, to convert ages calculated in sui to Western-style age, subtract one

year (so, for example, a person described as twenty sui was most likely close
W

to nineteen by Western counting).

In late imperial China, life for elite males was dominated by the extremely
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competitive examination system, which determined whether a man could

hi

enter the prestigious and lucrative career of official bureaucrat. The system
had three tiers: a young man first had to pass the county-level examination,
ng

at which point he would receive the sheng yuan degree. That qualified him to
to

take the provincial-level, or juren, examinations. Becoming a juren allowed a

man to sit for the national, or metropolitan, examination (so-called because
n

it was held at the imperial capital). If he passed the national examination, he

Pr

became a celebrated jinshi. The examinations were held every three years, on
a rotating basis. At each stage of the examinations, candidates who passed
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were ranked: the man who attained the top-ranked jinshi degree in his
cohort was called a zhuang yuan; he was assured of national fame and in
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most cases an illustrious political career.

xi
 Chronology
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Xia ca. 2100–ca. 1600 bce

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Shang (Yin) ca. 1600–ca. 1028 bce

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Zhou ca. 1027–ca. 256 bce

Qin 221–207 bce
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Han 206 bce–220 ce

Three Kingdoms 220–280
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“Six Dynasties” 222–589

Sui 581–618
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Tang 618–907
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Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms 907–979

Song 960–1279
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Yuan (Mongol) 1260–1368

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Ming 1368–1644
Qing (Manchu) 1644–1911
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Republican period 1911–1949

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Maoist period 1949–1979

Reform period 1980–present
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xii
 s
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Gender and Chinese History

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U
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Introduction
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Beverly Bossler
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W
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hat is gender in Chinese history? How has the study of gen-

der changed the way we understand Chinese history? And
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conversely, how does the study of gender in China alter our

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understanding of what “gender” is? This volume considers these questions

and explores how gendered analysis can be extended to new areas of histori-
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cal inquiry.
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On the surface, the meaning of “the history of gender in China” may

seem self-evident, but closer inquiry reveals that all three of the central
n

terms—especially in juxtaposition to one another—are subject to varying

Pr

understandings. “History” in the European-American tradition once meant

primarily the study of political events, the rise and fall of states and govern-
es

ing entities, or perhaps the study of ideas, as in the rise of the Renaissance
and the Enlightenment. Likewise in the case of China, where a powerful and
s

respected historical tradition was established more than two thousand years
ago, “history” until well into the twentieth century focused especially on the
rise and fall of dynasties or on developments in Confucian and Buddhist
thought. In the mid-twentieth century, the introduction of the “new social
history” expanded the purview of “history” to include the study of social
groups, categories, and forces that had seemingly little connection to politi-

3
cal or intellectual developments. In new historical studies of both the West
and (somewhat later) China, one of the social groups that began to receive
attention was women, and one of the social categories identified as impor-
tant (along with class and ethnicity) was gender. As topics such as women
and family became the focus of historical inquiry, the meaning of “history”
itself began to change: it turned out that gender had a very close connection
to political and intellectual developments and, indeed, was crucial to under-
standing them.
What we mean by “China” might seem more obvious and concrete, but
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in fact there were and are many “Chinas,” especially if we consider change
over time. Even today, “China” incorporates many ethnic populations, and
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whether certain geographical areas can be considered Chinese is a highly

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contested question. In the past, the situation was even more complicated: for
centuries at a time, the area we now call China was divided into competing
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small states; during other periods, China was subsumed into larger empires
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ruled by foreign (non-Chinese) invaders, such as the Mongols and Manchus.

In the face of this complexity, the term “China” becomes either so vague as to
of

be almost meaningless or, more dangerously, a political assertion, an insis-

tence on the presence and continuity of a unified nation-state well before one
W

existed. We use “China,” then, as shorthand, in full awareness that the term
obscures important temporal and geographical variation.
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What then of “gender”? Certainly “male” and “female” were and are
hi

among the fundamental (and fundamentally hierarchical) categories used

by people in China (as elsewhere) to organize and comprehend human soci-
ng

ety, the animal world, and even physical phenomena. Yet some scholars have
to

argued that “gender” operated differently in the Chinese past than in Europe
or even in the Chinese present. According to this argument, in the European
n

tradition “man” and “woman” were understood as among the most funda-
Pr

mental divisions in society, and maleness or femaleness was the quintes-

sential basis of an individual’s social identity. In China, by contrast, gender
es

divisions of male and female were subsumed in other, more specific social
categories based in family relations (such as “son,” “daughter,” “father,”
s

“mother,” “husband,” “wife”).1 Accordingly, in China before the twentieth

century, individual identities were tied less to gender than to these familial
roles. In part for this reason, the argument continues, gender identities in
China were also less tied to bodily difference than in the European tradi-
tion: “What appear as ‘gender’ are yin/yang differentiated positions: not two
anatomical ‘sexes,’ but a profusion of relational, bound, unequal dyads.”2

4 Beverly Bossler
The historical implications of this analysis are admittedly still controversial,
but the larger point here is that studying how gender hierarchies operated
in China forces us to confront the limited and culturally bounded nature
of concepts of gender—including those typically employed in Anglophone
scholarship. In other words, we are challenged to rethink how we under-
stand the idea of gender itself.
In short, by using the phrase “gender and Chinese history” in the title of
this book, we do not mean to designate a concrete, bounded topic but rather
to point to a field of scholarly inquiry, the terms of which are fluid, constantly
U

shifting, and mutually constituting. To put it another way, we assume that

the study of gender in Chinese history permits—or compels—us to develop
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new understandings of China, history, and gender.

ve

Some sense of this process and its salutary effects can be illustrated first
and foremost by reviewing how attention to gender has changed some of the
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standard narratives of Chinese history. A recent survey by Gail Hershatter

i ty

has already extensively cataloged the contributions that the study of women
and gender has made to the field of twentieth-century Chinese history; like-
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wise, research on women, family, and gender has altered our understanding
of the premodern, or imperial, period of Chinese history.3
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One of the first and most fundamental contributions of the study of

women and gender in imperial China was simply to demonstrate that the
as

study of women in China’s past was possible. As early as the 1970s, impor-
hi

tant anthropological work had begun to demonstrate the benefits of studies

that focused on women, showing, for example, that Chinese kinship struc-
ng

tures looked very different when they were viewed from the perspective of
to

women.4 But would-be historians of Chinese women, especially those inter-

ested in the imperial past, were frequently advised that relevant sources did
n

not exist. Women in imperial China were largely illiterate and cloistered
Pr

within their homes, so the received wisdom went, so they left no informa-
tion about themselves. Moreover, since elite men’s lives were devoted to
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the examination system and government service, from which women were
barred, the sources they left us had nothing significant to say about women.
s

Intrepid researchers soon proved the speciousness of such warnings. Jen-

nifer Holmgren showed that even the stylized official biographies of imperial
women contained rich information for analysis of marriage customs, family
power, and women’s property rights; Priscilla Ching Chung demonstrated
that the Song dynasty employed an extensive and highly specialized bureau-
cracy of female officials (many of whom were literate) to manage life within

Introduction 5
the imperial palace.5 Patricia Ebrey mined funerary inscriptions, household
handbooks, and anecdotal literature to elucidate the nature of family rela-
tions in the Song period.6 Over the course of the 1980s, scholars also began
to explore the significant roles women played in Buddhism and other Chi-
nese religious traditions; documented the achievement and long-standing
recognition of Chinese women painters; and showed how educated wives
and daughters were central to literati family strategies in the late imperial
period.7 By the 1990s, no one could suggest that sources for the study of
women in imperial China were lacking.
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Over the course of the succeeding decades, research on women and gen-
der began to reshape much of our basic understanding of Chinese history.
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Susan Mann’s pathbreaking work on women and gender in the Qing dynasty
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demonstrated that, far from being irrelevant to the male world of politics
and governance, women were a central focus of it. Emperors, bureaucrats,
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and philosophers alike saw the actions of women as critical to the overall
i ty

peace and prosperity of the empire.8 Individual families and the empire as a
whole relied on the economic contributions of women, their production of
of

cloth and other household goods.9 Literati families relied as well on wom-
en’s financial-management skills, for women managing the family budget
W

allowed men to focus on their studies.10 At court, women used their influence
on emperors to shape and even control government policy.11 And all fami-
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lies, at every level, relied on the reproductive capacities of women, making

hi

women’s health an explicit topic of concern for both medical professionals

and household heads.12
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As this research progressed, it forced scholars to reassess the prevailing

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stereotype of Chinese women as hapless victims of an oppressively patriarchal

society. Dorothy Ko brilliantly traced the evolution of this stereotype, show-
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ing how Chinese reformers (mostly male) in the late nineteenth and early
Pr

twentieth centuries justified their calls for social change in part by erasing
the long-standing tradition of female literacy. Ko argued to the contrary that
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literate women had helped fuel a dramatic expansion of printing in the late
Ming dynasty, and she drew the attention of the Anglophone scholarly world
s

to a surprisingly substantial body of surviving women’s writings—mostly

poetry but also essays, literary criticism, letters, and so forth—from the late
imperial period.13 Ko’s scholarship in turn helped spawn a series of works
devoted to the examination and publication of Chinese women’s writings
from the imperial period.14 In combination with new recognition of wom-
en’s power in the household, the exploration of women’s own writings also

6 Beverly Bossler
permitted a new and more complex understanding of women’s roles in the
gender system in which they lived. While some writings by women indeed
complained of the restrictions and limitations of the Chinese gender sys-
tem, others detailed the satisfactions available to women in their varied roles
as wives, mothers, and grandmothers. Even bound feet, generally regarded
as the quintessential symbol of Chinese women’s suffering and oppression,
turned out to have had very different and frequently positive meanings in
the eyes of women who possessed them. We learned that, as a sign of beauty,
disciplined cultivation, and Chinese ethnicity, bound feet could be experi-
U

enced as a source of pride rather than as a marker of subjugation. Scholars

began to understand that the Chinese gender system (like those of America
ni

and elsewhere today) offered women rewards as well as injustices, and that
ve

its longevity rested in part on women’s active participation and promotion.15

This awareness helped inspire and was reinforced by a reassessment of
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the figure of the faithful woman (jie fu) in Chinese culture. Like the bound
i ty

foot, the faithful woman had figured prominently in reformist rhetoric of

the early twentieth century as a symbol of Chinese society’s unrelenting cru-
of

elty to women. In the late imperial period, two kinds of faithful women had
been valorized. One category consisted of widows who refused to remarry
W

after their husbands died. The other category included women who were
martyrs to an ideal of bodily purity, who chose suicide rather than tolerate
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rape or other assaults—even strictly verbal ones—on their sexual integrity.

hi

In reformist rhetoric of the late nineteenth century and beyond, both types
of women figured as pathetic victims of China’s pathological gender system.
ng

Widowed women were portrayed as doomed to lead miserable and isolated

to

lives: abused by relatives, stigmatized as unlucky, and shunned by society.

Women who committed suicide for the sake of maintaining bodily purity
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came to be understood as benighted and misguided.

Pr

Over the past three decades, scholarship on what is often called the
“fidelity cult” has challenged this picture on many fronts. This scholarship
es

has shown the significant ways that demands for female fidelity evolved
over time, while also tracing the cult’s disparate institutional structures and
s

social meanings. An early article by Mark Elvin traced the development

of the cult in the late imperial period (roughly the fourteenth century to
the nineteenth). Elvin explored the state’s involvement, through the issu-
ing of government awards, in the promotion of female fidelity (as well as
other “Confucian” virtues), and the gradual easing over time of qualifica-
tions (age, years of chaste widowhood) necessary to receive awards.16 Soon

Introduction 7
afterward, Susan Mann showed in even greater detail how and why the
early Qing dynasty government attempted to redirect the fidelity cult away
from martyrdom by providing incentives for maintaining faithful widows
in the household.17 A few years later, T’ien Ju-K’ang demonstrated that the
cult of fidelity, and especially widow suicide, had expanded dramatically in
the Ming dynasty, and argued that one important force behind the cult was
the tendency of literati men to write about faithful women to assuage their
own frustrations and anxieties about the competitive society in which they
lived.18 In the 1990s, Katharine Carlitz advanced our understanding of the
U

cult with several articles that explored the popularity (and novelistic attrac-
tion) of texts extolling faithful female exemplars; she also detailed the use-
ni

fulness, to local officials, of shrines to faithful widows and described how

ve

the cult was furthered by romantic interpretations that depicted suicide as

an expression of female passion.19 Mining legal archives, Matthew Sommer
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elucidated the ways that state and family concerns about loyalty and widows’
i ty

property intersected in the cult during the Qing dynasty, while Janet Theiss
demonstrated the complicated and often unexpected ways that the cult was
of

used and abused to advance the varied interests of women, their families,
and the state in that period.20 The emotional, social, and political signifi-
W

cance of the cult was further explored in Weijing Lu’s 2008 study of one of
its more extreme manifestations: “faithful maidens.” These were women who
as

pledged fidelity (through suicide or, more commonly, lifelong celibacy) to

hi

their deceased fiancés. All these scholars showed that the cult of fidelity in
imperial China was a complex and contested phenomenon, shaped and used
ng

by women as well as men to further personal goals and create meaning in

to

their lives.21
The topic of female fidelity in China is also closely related to women’s
n

property rights and their evolution over the course of the imperial period.
Pr

Early articles by Jennifer Holmgren elucidated the gradual intensification of

demands for widow fidelity and increasing restrictions on women’s prop-
es

erty rights over the course of the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, showing
that both developments tied women more closely to their marital families.22
s

Holm­gren’s suggestions were further elaborated by Bettine Birge, who argued

that women’s property rights had expanded in the Song period, only to be
reduced under the Mongol Yuan dynasty. Like Holmgren, Birge saw new
Yuan laws restricting women’s ability to take a deceased husband’s property
into a second marriage as partly a result of the imposition of Mongol ideas
about property and widows on the Han Chinese populace, but she argued

8 Beverly Bossler
that success of such laws was also related to the efforts of neo-Confucian
philosophers to impose a stricter standard of female morality on the popu-
lace.23 Kathryn Bernhardt, conversely, asserted that laws established by the
first Ming emperor created the most dramatic change in women’s property
rights, and suggested that, paradoxically, the fidelity cult helped to amelio-
rate the most stringent aspects of the new laws: worried that families could
abuse the law to gain widows’ property, judges tended to award faithful wid-
ows the right to appoint their own heirs and control property in trust for
them.24
U

As T’ien, Carlitz, and others had shown, the fidelity cult was inextricably
associated with men’s writing about women, and critical evaluation of tradi-
ni

tions of women’s biography has also proven to be a fruitful window into his-
ve

torical change in the Chinese gender system. Lisa Raphals’s 1998 monograph
demonstrated that ideas about yin and yang became more hierarchical over
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the course of the classical period, and she showed how late imperial redac-
i ty

tions of the Han dynasty work Biographies of Exemplary Women (Lie nü

zhuan) were reorganized to downplay the importance of women’s intellec-
of

tual virtue.25 My own recent work locates the rise of the fidelity cult in new
trends in men’s writing about women in the late Song and Yuan, trends that
W

were shaped by disparate factors, including the precarious political situation

of the Southern Song dynasty, a new craze for entertainment, and growing
as

pressures of social competition. I suggest that many aspects of the fidelity

hi

cult were cyclical, with female loyalty taking on intensified salience at times
of political or social instability.26 The importance of biography as a source
ng

for the history of women and gender was also highlighted in a wide-ranging
to

volume edited by Joan Judge and Hu Ying in 2011. The essays in that vol-
ume demonstrate the diversity and flexibility of the biographical tradition
n

devoted to Chinese women while also highlighting its persistent themes.27

Pr

In their own work, both Judge and Hu have demonstrated how the genre of
biographies of exemplary women was expanded and reconfigured at the end
es

of the imperial era, as male authors proposed new kinds of heroines as more
appropriate models for women in a modern nation-state.28
s

As this discussion suggests, much research on the history of gender in

imperial China has focused on women. By the 1990s, however, a number of
historians had begun to consider how the Chinese gender system affected
men. Several studies focused on male homosexual relations. One early mono-
graph demonstrated that male homosexual bonds were widely accepted in
imperial China, and argued that the repressive attitudes of the current gov-

Introduction 9
ernment were a relatively recent phenomenon.29 Later studies examined legal
statutes governing homosexuality, suggesting that the government’s concern
was not male-male relationships per se but the maintenance of proper social
hierarchies and the protection of young males from sexual exploitation.30
Another scholar argued that Qing dynasty sources reveal multiple and vary-
ing understandings of male homosexuality, including some recognition of
the possibility that male homosexual desire might be an innate character-
istic of some men.31 In 2000, a forum sponsored by the American Histori-
cal Association moved beyond the issue of sexuality to consider other types
U

of male-male bonds in Chinese history, including friendship, sibling rela-

tions, and sworn brotherhoods.32 The topic of male friendship was further
ni

explored in a special issue of the journal Nan Nü, which featured a group of
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articles devoted to the examination of male friendship in the Ming dynasty.33

The issue of Chinese masculinity in the imperial period has also begun to
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attract the attention of scholars, though to date the topic of masculinity has
i ty

been probed largely through literary texts. Although their specific findings
differ, scholars have agreed that masculinity in imperial China was closely
of

tied to social and perhaps political status, with different modes of masculin-
ity operating in different social strata. They are also generally agreed that
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masculinity tended to be defined more in the context of hierarchical rela-

tions with other men than in reference to women, though at all social levels
as

imperviousness to female sexuality was considered an admirable masculine

hi

trait.34 The important contributions of these authors notwithstanding, much

remains to be learned of how masculinity operated in various historical con-
ng

texts, and how it changed over time. (Chapter 3, by Yulian Wu, addresses
to

these issues.)
As this brief (and far from exhaustive) review of recent scholarship sug-
n

gests, attention to gender has changed our understanding of imperial Chi-

Pr

nese history in several important ways. It has revealed the imperial state’s
commitment to a gender order that it saw as both ordained by heaven and
es

critical to the state’s own survival, while also showing the flexible ways that
the gender order could be deployed. It has demonstrated the inextricable
s

links between the gender order, the Chinese family system, and wider social
and political phenomena. Most importantly, it has shown the ways that
women and men worked within and around the demands of a hierarchical
gender system to pursue their own interests and agendas. Scholarship on
the gender system of imperial history has also been important in increasing
our understanding of the political and social history of twentieth-century

10 Beverly Bossler
China. As already noted, early-twentieth-century reformers helped justify
their own policies and power by castigating the “backward” gender system
of the imperial period. But as scholarship on the modern period has shown,
many aspects of that system have continued to be salient in the twentieth
century and beyond. To cite but one example: female fidelity and sexual
purity were, ironically, key characteristics of the heroines that the Chinese
Communist Party created to model their new socialist morality.35

The present volume builds on the rich legacy of the existing scholarship by
U

taking the study of gender in China in a variety of new directions. Each of

the chapters can be considered a case study of sorts, though the focus of the
ni

different chapters ranges widely, from images to individuals, from marriage

ve

to masculinity. Each chapter breaks new ground, thematically, method-

ologically, or both, while collectively the chapters trace a number of com-
rs

mon themes across widely separated eras. Ann Waltner’s chapter, which
i ty

opens the volume, conspicuously probes the limits of historical sources and
what we can know. The historiographical concerns she raises are taken up
of

in later chapters by Yulian Wu, Ellen Widmer, Joan Judge, Emily Honig,
and Gail Hershatter, all of whom turn to unconventional sources, or use
W

conventional sources in unconventional ways, to consider how understand-

ings of the past are created, transmitted, and put to use. The relationship
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between gender and government policies, central to Guotong Li’s study in

hi

chapter 2, is also explored in the chapters by Judge, Honig, and Hershat-

ter. These chapters reinforce the point that, in the twentieth century as in
ng

the eighteenth, those who ruled China saw proper gender relations as key
to

to successful governance and a smoothly functioning society. At the same

time, they demonstrate how radically ideals of female virtue could change
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over time.
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Several of the chapters focus on women’s talent, education, and writing.

Guotong Li highlights the tensions between literate and nonliterate modes of
es

women’s education, and Judge describes a similar tension between the liter-
ary education of “women of talent” and twentieth-century efforts to extend
s

education to more women. Weijing Lu, Widmer, Judge, and Yan Wang reveal
the multiplicity of ways that women used writing—in poetry, political tracts,
and family letters—to assert their identities and shape their interactions
with the wider world. The chapters by Widmer, Judge, and Wang also show
how differently women could experience and respond to the same historical
circumstances.

Introduction 11
 All the chapters reveal how a focus on specific cases and intimate interac-
tions can inform our understanding of larger social change. All expose the
intricate connections between historical shifts in gender relations and other
forms of social and historical change (economic growth, political change,
new media). And all repeatedly remind us that the Chinese gender system
was never static.
The chapters in this volume cluster in three key time periods: the eigh-
teenth century, when imperial China was at the height of its power and
prosperity (chapters 1 through 4); the late nineteenth and early twentieth
U

centuries, when China was undergoing the wrenching transition between

long-standing imperial traditions and new “modern,” social formations
ni

(chapters 5 through 7); and the latter half of the twentieth century, which
ve

included both the radical social experiments of the Maoist period and the
equally dramatic changes brought about by “socialist capitalism” under the
rs

Reform period (chapters 8 and 9). In the first two sets of chapters, the reader
i ty

will encounter the term late imperial, which is commonly used in historical
studies of China to designate the Ming and Qing dynasties.36 A few authors,
of

however, underscore China’s connections with other parts of the globe by

employing the term early modern to designate this period. This varied termi-
W

nology already begins to show us how differing perspectives shape historical

meanings.
as

In the opening chapter of the volume, Ann Waltner literally alters our
hi

perspective on China’s eighteenth century by focusing on an illustration of

a Chinese bridal procession that appeared in a French account of Chinese
ng

customs from that century. Waltner’s juxtaposition of this European image

to

with what we know about Chinese weddings from Chinese textual sources
exposes transcultural similarities in gender regimes (for example, in both
n

China and Europe, a proper wedding involved a procession and display of

Pr

property), as well as important disjunctures (as the illustration blends what

seem to be accurately rendered details of Chinese wedding rituals with Euro-
es

pean fantasies of exotic Chinese practices). Waltner’s analysis also shows that
gender relations are a touchstone for cultural interaction, and that the lens
s

of gender transforms how we think about global and comparative history.

In chapter 2, Guotong Li continues the exploration of the intersection
of gender and culture and adds the complicating factor of politics. Li takes
as her subject the life and work of the moralist and local official Lan Ding­
yuan (1680–1733). A southern Fujianese whose own cultural heritage was
mixed (his ancestors included both Han and minority She families), Lan

12 Beverly Bossler
was known for his commitment to Confucian moral transformation but also
for his sympathetic and practical understanding of the realities of life on the
empire’s margins. Li elucidates the concrete measures by which Lan sought
to promulgate Confucian “family values” at the local level, showing how his
methods were influenced by his understanding of ethnic difference. She also
notes the surprising resonances between Lan’s views and those of moderniz-
ing reformers more than a century later: although those reformers explicitly
rejected Lan’s Confucian morality, they shared his assumption that women’s
behavior was crucial to the success of the state, as well as his conviction that
U

women required the guidance and direction of men. Finally, Li’s chapter
highlights the close association in Lan’s mind between female virtue and
ni

female labor: as we see in chapters 7, 8, and 9, the idea that women’s virtue
ve

was tied to women’s labor persisted well into the modern period.
Yulian Wu, in chapter 3, turns away from men’s actions in relation to
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women to consider gender relations among men and, especially, the inter-
i ty

sections of class and masculinity. From early imperial times, merchants had
been disdained in Chinese society and were considered socially and mor-
of

ally inferior to scholars. Wu shows how gender played into this social equa-
tion, examining the ways that a wealthy eighteenth-century merchant, Wang
W

Qishu (1728–98), actively positioned himself as masculine among his friends

and acquaintances. In part by paying attention to material objects, Wu
as

shows that, in the context of the eighteenth-century economic expansion,

hi

merchants like Wang were able to upend age-old moral codes and assert that
the ability to accumulate wealth was itself a sign of masculine achievement.
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In chapter 4, Weijing Lu returns to the topic of marriage by investigating

to

the companionate relationship of one of the most famous scholarly couples

of the Qing dynasty, Wang Zhaoyuan (1763–1851) and her husband, Hao
n

Yi­xing (1757–1825). Lu traces the couple’s emotional interactions as recorded

Pr

in the poetry volume they jointly compiled. Lu shows that their writings
not only illuminate their own romantic and intellectual intimacy but also
es

reflect an eighteenth-century reconfiguration of the “cult of emotion [qing],”

in which romance became less associated with tragic love affairs and under-
s

stood more as a feature of ideal marital relations.

In the second part of the volume, chapters 5, 6, and 7 all focus on critical
social transitions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and
all three are concerned with the question of how the “genteel ladies” (guixiu)
or educated “talented women” (cainü) of the imperial period became the
modern “New Women” of the early twentieth century.37 In chapter 5, Ellen

Introduction 13
Widmer argues that the changes began much earlier than we generally
assume: she demonstrates that, already in the 1870s, educated upper-class
women had begun to publish their poetry in the new media of newspapers
and literary supplements. Widmer shows how the publication of women’s
writing in the new media represented both a continuity with traditional
practices and an important departure from them. She concludes that the
new media provided a venue for a new kind of public interaction among
women, creating, she suggests, “the idea of a national forum for women.”
In chapter 6, Joan Judge considers the ways that women’s writing prac-
U

tices—as well as ideas about women’s talent and the nature of women’s edu-
cation—changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Judge
ni

investigates the activities and experiences of three women from a single fam-
ve

ily, whose adult lives spanned a period from the 1870s to the 1960s. Extending
the trajectory of women’s learning explored by Widmer in chapter 5, Judge
rs

shows how, over the course of the early twentieth century, the poetry of classi-
i ty

cally educated “women of talent” evolved into expository (and often politically
directed) prose. By analyzing photographs of her subjects, Judge also delin-
of

eates an equally dramatic shift in the ways that the ideal female was visualized
during this period. Judge’s findings ultimately lead her to take issue with the
W

widely held view that the 1911 Revolution was a “nonevent.” Instead, she con-
cludes, the Revolution was a significant turning point in terms of modes of
as

civic engagement and social interaction, as manifested in the unprecedented

hi

opportunities in politics and public life available to women.

In the final chapter of this section, Yan Wang enriches our understand-
ng

ing of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century transition by detail-

to

ing the transformation of a very different sort of “genteel lady.” Wang’s

subject, Lady Zhuang (1866–1927), was modestly educated—literate, but not
n

a literary talent like the women studied by Lu, Widmer, and Judge. Rather,
Pr

Lady Zhuang’s life is interesting (and documented) because she became the
younger, successor wife of the powerful and wealthy modernizing official
es

Sheng Xuanhuai. Making use of the hitherto untapped archive of Sheng

Xuanhuai’s family papers, Wang follows Zhuang’s life as a “leisured lady
s

of means” in the rapidly modernizing city of Shanghai. She demonstrates

Zhuang’s substantial role in managing not only the family’s household bud-
get but also many of her husband’s business enterprises, handling large sums
of money, investing in commodity markets, and relying on both her social
networks and new technologies like the telegraph to obtain critical market
information. Like the chapters by Widmer and Judge, Wang’s study reveals

14 Beverly Bossler
how quickly and creatively erstwhile “genteel ladies” responded to the new
opportunities of the twentieth century, as well as the variety of forms their
responses could take.
The final two chapters of the volume bring us into recent times, with
both Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter considering how events of the Mao-
ist period have been understood and reinterpreted during the era of post-
Mao reforms. Honig’s innovative chapter explores the “life history” not of
a person but of an iconic Maoist slogan: “The times have changed; men and
women are the same. Anything male comrades can do, female comrades
U

can do too.” Honig’s deft analysis reveals the surprising origins of the slogan
and the very gradual process by which it became prevalent. Although the
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slogan is widely regarded as emblematic of Cultural Revolution attitudes,

ve

Honig also exposes the persistence throughout the period of a significant

counterdiscourse to the slogan’s emphasis on gender sameness. Her findings
rs

not only complicate standard interpretations of the Cultural Revolution but

i ty

also suggest how profoundly our knowledge of the past is shaped by both
inadvertent and deliberate misremembering.
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The topic of memory and its relationship to history is taken up even more
explicitly in Gail Hershatter’s chapter. Hershatter probes the disjunction
W

between rural women’s attempts to convey their remembered lives to their

daughters, and the daughters’ understanding of their mothers’ lives. In inten-
as

sive interviews with an elderly mother and her middle-aged daughter, Her-
hi

shatter uncovers the disparate ways they understand the past and each other.
In the process, she also reveals the complex and convoluted manner in which
ng

the understanding of female virtue has changed over the last half century or so
to

of Communist rule. Her conclusion reminds us that “bad transmissions” are

useful to the historian, for in the “static” associated with such transmissions,
n

we find clues to the ways that stories of the past are “heard and reencoded in
Pr

contemporary terms, inflected by contemporary dilemmas.” Together, these

final two chapters expose both profound changes and deep continuities in
es

China’s gender regime and leave us with a heightened sense of the ways that
visions of the past are shaped by contemporary concerns.
s

In bringing new approaches to the study of gender in Chinese history,

the diverse chapters in this volume illuminate the multifarious ways that
gender relations have influenced, and been influenced by, historical change
in both the distant and more recent Chinese pasts. Individually and col-
lectively, they encourage us to think differently about China, history, and
gender itself.

Introduction 15
 Notes
1 Barlow, “Theorizing Woman,” 253–89. See also Rowe, “Women and the Family,” 2–7.
2 Barlow, “Theorizing Woman,” 259.
3 Hershatter, Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century.
4 Wolf, Women and the Family; see also the various essays collected in Young, Women
in China and in Wolf and Witke, Women in Chinese Society.
5 Holmgren, “Family, Marriage and Political Power”; “Observations on Marriage and
Inheritance; “Imperial Marriage; Chung, Palace Women.
6 Ebrey, Family and Property; “The Early Stages”; “Concubines in Sung China.”
7 Levering, “The Dragon Girl”; Cahill, “Performers and Female Taoist Adepts” (see
U

also her Transcendence and Divine Passion), as well as Despeux and Kohn, Women
ni

in Daoism; Weidner, Flowering in the Shadows; Mann, “Widows.”

8 Mann, Precious Records; Birge, “Chu Hsi and Women’s Education”; Holmgren,
ve

“Imperial Marriage.”
9 Mann, Precious Records, 143–77; Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, 131–51; Bray, Technology
rs

and Gender.
i

10 Birge, “Chu Hsi and Women’s Education”; Mann, “Widows”; Ebrey, The Inner Quar-
ty

ters, 114–30; McDermott, “The Chinese Domestic Bursar.”

11 Elliot, “Manchu Widows”; Chaffee, “The Rise and Regency of Empress Liu”; Bossler,
of

“Gender and Entertainment at the Song Court”; Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency;
Ebrey, “Empress Xiang.”
W

12 Furth, A Flourishing; Bray, Technology and Gender; Lee, “Gender and Medicine”;
Wu, Reproducing Women.
as

13 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers.

14 Chang, Saussy, and Kwong, Women Writers; Widmer and Chang, Writing Women;
hi

Idema and Grant, The Red Brush; Fong, Herself an Author.

ng

15 Mann, Precious Records; The Talented Women; Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers;
Cinderella’s Sisters.
to

16 Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State.”

17 Mann, Precious Records, 23–26.
n

18 T’ien, Male Anxiety.

Pr

19 Carlitz, “Desire, Danger, and the Body”; “The Daughter, the Singing-Girl”; “Shrines”;
“The Social Uses.”
es

20 Sommer, “The Uses of Chastity”; Theiss, Disgraceful Matters.

21 Lu, True to Her Word.
s

22 Holmgren, “The Economic Foundations of Virtue”; “Observations on Marriage and

Inheritance.”
23 Birge, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction.
24 Bernhardt, “A Ming-Qing Transition?” See also her Women and Property in China.
25 Raphals, Sharing the Light.
26 Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity.
27 Judge and Hu, Beyond Exemplar Tales.
28 Judge, The Precious Raft; Hu, Tales of Translation.

16 Beverly Bossler
29 Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve.
30 Sommer, “The Penetrated Male”; Sex, Law, and Society; “Dangerous Males.”
31 Szonyi, “The Cult of Hu Tianbao.”
32 Mann, “The Male Bond”; Kutcher, “The Fifth Relationship”; Davis, “Fraternity and
Fratricide.”
33 See the articles by Huang, Gerritsen, Lam, and Besio in Nan Nü 9 (2007).
34 Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity; Song, The Fragile Scholar; Huang, Negotiat-
ing Masculinities.
35 Hershatter, The Gender of Memory; Wang, “Call me ‘Qingnian.’ ”
36 The term highlights the continuities in China’s social, economic, and (to a certain
extent) political systems through the Ming and Qing.
U

37 The question of what happened to the eighteenth-century “genteel woman” in the

ni

nineteenth century was raised, and elegantly answered, by Susan Mann in The Tal-
ented Women—see especially her summation of this issue in the epilogue, 195–200.
ve
rs
i ty
of
W
as
hi
ng
to
n
Pr
es
s

Introduction 17